I am also surprised - but I spent the weekend studying the whitelisted accounts and by-and-large they don't deserve the ratings they have received. Perhaps they need to be reviewed (which is a big job). A lot of spammy plagiarising accounts also get upvotes from smartsteem big bot (even though they are not on their whitelist). They do have a black list and a system where users can have posts reviewed for blacklisting - but it is such an unwieldy job. I (want to) believe in smartsteem that they might bring the system up to scratch eventually though.